Sandglass
by secondsflat
Summary: A series of seven post-The Truth vignettes.


Sandglass

* * *

Notes: This has been sitting on my hard drive more or less untouched since 2008 (!). I'm still not even sure if I like it, but hopefully someone will? Just... be merciful. My writing style has matured in the past six years.

* * *

I.

Until she had met Mulder, every aspect of Scully's life was divided, sand and sugar neatly striated, tightly layered but never intersecting. Neither intentional nor unintentional, but efficient and easy for precisely that reason.

The first time she'd met him, Mulder shook those tidy little lines until they were more like his own: jumbled up, undefined, with no solid beginning or end. A lifetime's worth of grit and grain, mixed together, thoroughly and hopelessly intertwined because, as she'd learned, that was the only thing that allowed him to keep moving forward.

But that old chemistry riddle remains: how to separate the two substances?

Easy. Keep boiling the whole thing for weeks, months, years, until the sugar eventually dissolves away, and all you're left with is the sand.

* * *

II.

Scully loses track of days somewhere around the second week.

The air conditioning stopped working a few states back, but the heater still works okay just to piss her off. They ride with the windows down and the radio up, and Scully's mouth feels like an hourglass, all sticky with dirt and sun-warmed sand.

She toes a McDonald's bag and several discarded layers of sweaty clothing, searching for somewhere cool to put her feet. For the first time in her life, Scully is covertly glad for clutter, for greasy fast food and the stale smell of sweat and mold and unwashed bodies, because it makes this all seem less like the sterile, stark vanilla she insisted upon in her regular life. Inside this car, just inside this car, time is standing still. The whole thing is an out-of-body experience and at her best, she feels wanton and dangerous, animalistic in her need to love and protect, to reconnect and reclaim; at her worst, she is withdrawn and angry and a little sad, too. Sometimes, to keep herself from going crazy, she pretends it's just a vacation (a beach or something, maybe, if they were those kind of people); but right now, her legs are sticking to the vinyl and she's had to pee for the last half hour and Jesus fucking Christ, she's so goddamn sick of Journey she could scream.

The car drifts to the side of the road, then stops. It happens so slowly that she doesn't realize it until she can't feel a breeze. A cloud of dust, kicked up from the tires, catches in her throat. _How strange it is to be so still_ , she thinks idly. _How unlike us_.

Mulder shuts the radio off first, then the car. He's not wearing a shirt; Scully told him not to take it off, but it was hot so he did it anyway and now he's burnt along the left side of his body. Halfway, half-and-half, like indecision or a suspended fall from grace. Here, in early evening, Mulder is a painting in white and gold, an incarnate of the blurred line between the Fall of Man and _Felix culpa_.

He loops his arms over the steering wheel.

"Fuck, Scully." Mulder squints and rubs a hand across the back of his neck and over the stubble that has accumulated since the last time he had a chance to shave; it's an abrasive, cleansing sandpaper that Scully can still feel around her throat and on her chest, red and raw and worth it in the end. She touches the newly-healed, papery skin of her neck. Mulder sighs. "I don't know. I don't know what to do anymore."

After nine years, after abductions and kidnappings, near-death and actual death, it feels like a betrayal of the deepest kind to hear him say it now.

Scully flexes her toes and watches the baptismal sunset reflect off the polish. In time, this desert will suffocate them, it will burn them, consume them, and dry them up entirely if they let it; she knows because it has already forced itself in through the cracks, chiseling away at every fault in their glass armor.

"Just drive, Mulder." She says.

So he does.

* * *

III.

Sometimes, when their situation feels just a little more romantic than dangerous, they pull off the road and sleep on the hood of the car until it gets too cold. There's something very _On the Road_ about cactuses at midnight; howling at the moon and all that. Mulder talks about blue highways and _Easy Rider_ and flippantly bestows a name upon the SUV: Ghost Dancing, just like that guy's van in that book he read, more or less, as an undergrad.

Then he's uncomfortable and quiet for a long time, because it was maybe a little too apt.

But Scully likes these nights when the wind stops and the sand settles and everything is still. _We'll be all right_ , she thinks. _Not right now, but in time._

* * *

IV.

The first time they have sex after his return, it's in the back seat of the same goddamn SUV they've used to escape from Virginia, in between a mountain of empty Styrofoam coffee cups and a rolling can of Fix-A-Flat. The seat is surprisingly narrow, and Scully thinks dryly there's no possible way there's enough room to accommodate both the expanse of their bodies and all of their emotional baggage, too.

She chides herself. It's really not funny.

The sex is awkward. At first he's too slow, and she's wondering which state lines they crossed while she was asleep and where they finally ended up for the night and whether there is really enough distance between their pursuers and themselves to be doing this. Then suddenly it's too fast, too soon, and every time Mulder moves inside of her it gives Scully that cold, metallic, copper penny feeling between her eyes that makes her forehead heavy with thoughts of cancer. She watches him fill her over and over from somewhere outside her body and imagines she is unclean, poisoned, contagious; she can almost feel the tumor stretching and moving lazily beneath her skin, blossoming, like William did so long ago in her belly.

Feeding on her.

 _Once you nursed a baby,_ she thinks. _Now you only nurse disease._

Scully doesn't come—doesn't even want to anymore—but she lets Mulder.

Later, in sleep, Mulder's hand finds the soft curve of Scully's breast and he rests his thumb in the crease at its base. "Next time," he promises drowsily, "for you." _Let's just go home, Mulder,_ thinks Scully, dipping her chin and pressing back against his chest. _Let's forget about the truth and just be together for however long we can. We'll find a home, and we'll go there._

Only she doesn't say it.

She'd never say it.

Instead, she falls asleep and dreams of miles and miles of sand, swirling in tornadoes around her and falling from the sky.

* * *

V.

Somewhere in Arizona they stop to see America's largest sundial. Not because Scully wants to, but because Mulder needs to stretch his legs and it's not like there's a time card to punch and how many opportunities in your life are you going to get to see a big phallic symbol that _tells time_ , Scully, so we might as well go.

When they get there, Mulder contemplates the rock and its shadow for a long moment, making a show of alternately checking the shadow's position with a hand shielding his eyes and trying to sound impressive by spouting what few non-paranormal details he remembers about early civilizations. He puts his hands on his hips, walks around the monument to where she stands, and firmly declares it with the utmost confidence to be 2:15. Give or take, of course.

He's full of bullshit and Scully tells him so because she saw the surreptitious look he gave his watch.

* * *

VI.

Sometimes Scully isn't tired and she drives all night, or most of it. She likes the stillness of it, the feeling of the two of them being the only moving things in the universe, as invisible and inconsequential as grains of sand through a funnel. So immaterial that even God won't touch them.

Mostly she sticks to back roads. When she starts to feel too small and isolated, she steers the car through a small town or village. Once, it was ranch land. Anywhere she can see signs of other people's lives, maybe a porch light or a mailbox, and where the simple naivete of life in little boxes is nearly palpable through the thick glass of the windshield.

At night, she doesn't think, she just keeps moving forward.

The sun rises.

The day begins.

* * *

VII.

 _Please, Mulder. I need to sleep in a real bed for one night,_ she'd said. _Not this goddamn car._ So, on a well-traveled dirt road sometime after midnight, they'd stopped at the first motel they found and counted their money in the cool watercolor light of the parking lot.

Mulder had quietly unlocked the door when they arrived and held it open for her; Scully had brushed past him toward the bathroom and started peeling off her two-day-old clothes before he even had the door shut. She took a long shower with the bathroom door locked, scrubbing every inch of her body red, then half-heartedly swirled some of their dirtier clothes around in the sink.

They'd need water tomorrow. Scully has made a habit of reminding Mulder to take long, deep pulls from his water bottle every hour or so when they're on the road even if he's not thirsty, which she knows he finds supremely annoying (but privately also a little endearing because it's so very Scully of her). After her shower, she'd filled up every plastic bottle she could find in the car from the tap in the bathroom. Before turning the light off, she'd lined them up on the counter like sentinels.

Mulder had already been asleep against the wall when she'd gotten into bed, mouth open and snoring off years of exhaustion. She'd curled around a pillow on the far end, carefully, so she didn't wake him.

The truth is she'd been lying in this bed for hours and hadn't slept at all.

She spent the first hour feeling annoyed because since she wasn't sleeping anyway she might as well be driving, and she spent the second hour hating herself because sometimes she wonders how much different her life could be if one day she just chose not to care about government conspiracies, or cancer, or him.

Then she thought of William. And Emily.

Now the motel room is a pre-dawn neutral, the stale sepia-gray absence of light that makes the room itself look like a daguerreotype. This hopeless hour, this unwitting time of lonely, silent reflection, makes Scully question how much fight she truly has left. At this point, she doesn't even know if they're winning or losing. She only knows they're both alive, and that will have to be enough until the morning because there were times in their past when she didn't even know that much. There was even one time when it wasn't true.

Tomorrow, she will pawn her gold cross necklace.

When he speaks, Mulder's voice is a gentle needle on a worn record, low and sleep-scratchy, and Scully aches with homesickness at the very familiarity of it. "So, Schrodinger and Heisenberg are driving in a car. It's pretty dark out and they hit a cat. Schrodinger says, 'Is it dead?', and Heisenberg says, 'I can't be certain.'"

Scully exhales a noise somewhere between a sob and wet, shaky laughter and rubs her nose with the back of her hand.

The mattress bows as Mulder turns toward her; she feels his knuckles where they rest carefully against the curve of her spine, and with the flat of his thumb he traces lazy figure eights over the vertebrae in the space between the edge of her shirt and the top of her underwear. She closes her eyes and the image is there in her head: a never-ending loop, an hourglass on its side with the two of them caught, together, in the middle.

 _Infinity,_ Scully thinks, and reaches for him.


End file.
